Individuals express support for civil liberties and human rights, but when threatened tend to restrict rights for both others and themselves. However, the question of whether or not rights are restricted to punish others or protect ourselves remains unclear. This meta-analysis integrates the findings of the effect of perceived threats on support for restrictions of civil liberties from 1997 to 2019. It includes 163 effect-size estimates from 46 different articles involving 91,716 participants. The presence of threat increased support for restrictions against outgroup members significantly more than ingroup members, providing a possible punitive explanation for support for restrictions of civil liberties. These findings contribute to the debate on rights and their relationship with deservingness, suggesting that we delineate those who deserve human rights and those who do not.

It has been seventy years since signing the Declaration of Human Rights, yet human right violations are still happening across the globe. This review asks the question – what is the impact of perceived threat on changing support for human rights into support for not-all-humans’ rights? In approaching human rights violations with a four-level model – institutions, cultures, groups, and individuals –, issues of capabilities, historical emotions, connectedness, and personality emerge. At the heart of these is the impact perceived threat has at each level within each issue. Limitations of current work, disagreements across the literature, and future directions are discussed.

Social psychology and cultural psychology have long been concerned with exploring the relationship between individuals and society (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007). A broad division has

Despite the widely ratified United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, support for civil liberties is easily eroded in times of threat. Understanding which factors moderate the relationship between threat and support for civil liberties is critical, yet remains relatively unexplored. In this study, we test a double moderation model in which support for the restriction of civil liberties in the face of threat is moderated by both right-wing authoritarianism and political sophistication. In a national representative dataset (N = 12,507), those low on right-wing authoritarianism became more like their high right-wing authoritarian peers in the face of threat. Also, those more sophisticated about political issues were less supportive of restrictions on civil liberties, but only when threat was low. We tested this model on both restrictions for the in-group, in terms of being wiretapped, and for the out-group, in terms of torturing suspected terrorists. Our results suggest that increasing political sophistication may have desirable consequences when considering the outcomes for in-group members, and we argue for increased efforts to expand the in-group we seek to protect.

The current state of race relations in the United States have brought to light the issue of the militarization of local police, where officers are being provided with unused equipment from the government’s war chest through the 1033 Program. But, is this increase in militarization beneficial, or does it harm relations between citizens and police? Using data on purchases provided by the Defense Logistics Agency, this paper analyzes effects of military purchases on assaults on police officers. Fixed effects negative binomial regressions on state-month level data show that stockpiling of material militarization equipment (guns, armor, and clothing) exhibits a statistically significant decrease in assaults, with guns showing no significant relation on assaults. However, operational militarization purchases (surveillance, sonar, and radar) lead to an increase of assaults, suggesting that there may be unforeseen consequences of increased militarization due to a change of structure and information gathering.